Our Toy System

It takes a lot for a house to function well… especially when all of us are home the majority of the time. I am now a stay at home homeschooling mom to 3 kids (ages 7, 3 and 16 months) and my husband works from home too.

3 years ago we decided we wanted more out of life so we sold our 1800 sq ft home in the city and built a 1080 sq ft metal building house in the country on my parents land. We wanted debt free living with more freedom to enjoy our kids and each other and freedom from the “gotta have more” mentality. For me it has brought SO much peace, joy and fulfillment along with allowing me to boost my creativity. Currently we have 2 rooms; the bed room and a play room.

When we moved into our house almost 2 years ago this is what our playroom started as.

This room would EASILY get trashed if all the toys were to stay in this room. It’s overwhelming to ME and would definitely be overwhelming to the kids to try and keep clean. And while I am an aspiring minimalist my kids are not. 🙂 Plus they are still at a young age where they love toys and I’ve seen them lost in imagination from playing with the toys. I’d honestly love if they only had sticks and rocks and cloths to play with but I haven’t converted everyone to life like Little House on the Prairie so this is what we have to work with. The kids helped me get rid of the stuff they don’t play with as much and pass things along that are no longer loved and from there we came up with a system together.

So here is our system now!

It’s a work in progress and we will eventually get the loft built but it’s very functional for the type of playing they like to do right now.

We organized all the toys by type in bins and they can basically “check out” their toys that they want to play with. I called it a toy rotation when they were smaller but now that the oldest is 7 and then 3 it’s more like a “toy library”. They can choose what they want to play with better than just rotating them.

All the toys in one spot! It’s easily accessible but not too easy where they get into everything and have it all spread out throughout my little house.

How often do they “check” things out?

It could be 3 times a day or 3 times a month, it just depends on their mood, what we are doing with school or how nice it is outside!

Do they play with every single toy bin?

So far they have their favorites and their go to’s and every couple months they get excited about a bin they haven’t played with in a while and they will get it out. I’ve noticed they actually play with each bin for a longer amount of time because they are focused on just that toy instead of being overwhelmed by all the toys.

Another plus is when friends come over there is no “dumping” of bins and trashing the playroom.

For more inspiration… How getting rid of stuff saved my motherhood